Openings and Closings
Two visits a year decide how the rest of your season goes. A closing done correctly protects your plaster, your plumbing, and your equipment through a Colorado winter. An opening scheduled correctly means your pool is swimmable on the date you promised, not three weeks after.
The single most important thing on this page: book your opening early. Memorial Day is the biggest opening weekend of the year and we work first come, first served.
What A Closing Includes
A closing is predictable work, because by the time we close a pool it is already clean and chemically balanced from regular service. A standard closing includes:
· Blowing out and plugging the lines
· Draining the equipment so nothing holds water through a freeze
· Adding winterizing algaecide
· Covering the pool
A standard closing is billed as a flat base per body of water, with any additional time at our standard labor rate, plus parts and chemicals. Current rates are on our Pricing and Rates page.
While we are there, we are also noting equipment condition. A closing is the best time to catch a failing heater, a weeping seal, or a filter that needs media, because you have all winter to fix it instead of six days before your season opens.
Do not drain your pool for winter
This is the most expensive mistake we see, and it is a common misconception. Draining the pool for winterizing does not protect it.
It puts the most costly parts of the pool at risk.
Concrete and plaster pools. Plaster has to stay hydrated. Drop the water level and expose the finish to air and it dries out, shrinks, and develops stress fractures, which weakens the bond and shortens the life of the surface. Plaster is far and away the most expensive single component to replace in a pool, so it is the last thing you should gamble with. As for tile, ceramic pool tile does not crack or break simply because ice forms at the surface. Water at the tile line only becomes a problem where tile or grout is already missing and water can get behind it and then freeze, which will pop more tile off the wall. The fix for that is repairing the tile and grout, not lowering the water.
Fiberglass pools. An empty shell has nothing holding it down. When hydrostatic pressure from groundwater under and around the shell exceeds the weight of the water inside it, the shell can bow, bend, or crack. In extreme cases it floats out of the ground, rips itself out of the concrete deck, damages the plumbing, and totals the pool.
Vinyl liner pools. Drained too far, the liner loses the water pressure holding it stretched against the walls. It pulls out of the bead, usually starting in the corners, and then wrinkles or tears. Sometimes a liner can be repaired. Often it has to be replaced.
The bottom line: do not drain your pool during winterizing. If someone has told you otherwise, call us before anything comes out.
Why Openings are Unpredictable
Closings are routine because we know the pool. Openings are not, because until we get there we do not know what the winter did to the equipment, what the water looks like, or what condition the surfaces are in.
Openings routinely take more than one visit. Getting a pool from winter to swimmable often means repeated vacuuming, multiple backwashes, and several rounds of chemical adjustment as the water clears and stabilizes. Add any winter equipment failure we find and the timeline moves again.
That is why openings are quoted as a base plus additional time and materials rather than a flat number. The base rate and hourly labor are published on our Pricing and Rates page.